This week I worked on refactoring my Repository Context Packager project. The goal was to clean up the structure of my code, improve readability, and reduce technical debt without changing how the program behaves. I created a new branch called refactoring from main so I could safely experiment and commit step by step.
The first thing I focused on was improving how file reading worked. My original FileReader class used raw C-style buffers, which made the logic harder to follow and risked truncating reads. I replaced it with a std::string buffer and used std::ifstream::gcount() to handle partial reads correctly. This made the function simpler, safer, and easier to maintain.
Next, I noticed that my utility functions for handling include/exclude patterns were scattered and duplicated. I refactored those into one main function called parse_patterns() and kept small wrapper functions for compatibility. This change made the code more modular and reduced the repetition between components.
For my third improvement, I sorted the output of the repository scan and directory tree. Before this, the order of results could change randomly between runs, which made testing and comparing outputs annoying. Sorting everything made the behavior deterministic and consistent.
Once all the refactoring steps were done, I had three commits on my refactoring branch. Then I used interactive rebase to squash them into a single, clean commit. The rebase went pretty smoothly, I was careful to test after each step, so there were no merge conflicts or surprises. After that, I used git commit --amend to polish the final commit message so it summarized all the changes clearly. Finally, I merged the branch back into main with a fast-forward merge and pushed everything to GitHub. I also deleted the refactoring branch to keep the repo tidy.
I didn’t find any major bugs, but I did have a few moments where I thought I broke something because I forgot to rebuild before testing. Thankfully, everything still worked after my changes. Overall, the refactoring made my code much cleaner and more maintainable. It was satisfying to see the final result a single, well-documented commit that represents all my improvements.
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